If you hear a boom at 9pm it's colonialism.

The "9 O'Clock Gun" in Stanley Park was used at one point to set chronometers on ships. Setting longitude by chronometer is an astronomical navigation technique that was used on the ships from Europe that invaded this area.

#AAACASCA https://twitter.com/jcookanthro/status/1197931395781251073

Astronomy was integral to colonialism in BC. As a tool of navigation and mapping it is intimately linked to the seizing, mapping, and naming of lands where people already lived, where they had already named the places. Navigation was also done using telescopes to observe Jupiter.

In writing histories of Canadian astronomy, the astronomer John Stanley Plaskett (1865-1941) describes astronomy as a skill any "explorer" had to learn in order to attempt any sea or land exploration of the northern pacific coast of North America.

Plaskett tells a story of explorers and their proficiency in astronomical methods making their "great accomplishments" possible.

Plaskett describes how when Captain James Cook's ships "Resolution" and "Discovery" made landfall in 1778, it was following a voyage using one of the earliest chronometers. They started naming and mapping already named places immediately.

Colonial versions of the "discovery" story describe how the astronomer on these first European ships to arrive determined the latitude and longitude of a point called Astronomer's Rock which they claim was "the first accurately coordinated point on America's west coast."

In research I've done at University of Victoria into the colonial history of astronomy in BC (particularly Vancouver Island) I've seen how erasure of indigenous science, knowledge, and place names here relied on proficiency in European astronomy. True of colonialism everywhere.

When Plaskett tells the history of Canadian astronomy from the settler perspective, he also talks about astronomy used by Alexander Mackenzie, the Scottish "explorer" who is often described as having complete "the first crossing of the American continent north of Mexico."

When reviewing the challenges faced by Mackenzie as he tried to take astronomical measurements for navigation during his travel, one is described by Plaskett as: "the hostile Indians"...

In Plaskett's settler history of astronomy in Canada he imagines the "hostile Indians" crowding around Mackenzie examining his instruments as he attempts to make measurements.

Every page of Plaskett's history of astronomy in Canada is racist. The main instrument at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory (DAO) on Vancouver Island is the 1.83 meter Plaskett Telescope. He was the first director of the DAO and proposed and designed the telescope.

Frontier ideology about "the west" explicitly shaped space science and imagination in early Canadian astronomy. When Plaskett lobbied the government to build a bigger telescope he said there might be something about a "broader viewpoint inherent in the farthest west."

Fast forward through 100 years of Canadian astronomy to find the government committed $243.5 million to TMT, the project attempting build a telescope on the sacred mountain Mauna Kea, despite native Hawaiian objections. Institutional astronomy continuing colonial tradition.

Conversation about TMT at #AAACASCA: https://twitter.com/g_mascha/status/1198310757093515265